OJS 3 Special characters no longer show since upgrade from OJS2

Software Support
1

We recently upgraded our OJS website ( thepolynesiansociety.org) website and the new webfonts available do not seem to support the extended font sets we need to display special language characters that are necessary. For example a with a macron (bar) over the top.
I have set the basic template fonts e.g., Noto Sans etc and tried the others but none seem to put the macrons back (see latest issue page to see the problem).
It is possible that I have to enable the extended latin subset fonts to see them and tried via some css added in to the website setup but that did not seem to work.

Do you have any suggestions for the best way to get the system to use the extended language font sets in the default template? Or suggest another alternative?

Many thanks,
Simon

2

Hi @sbiggles,

I don’t think this is due e.g. to new web fonts; I think what’s happened is that your character set configuration has changed somehow during the upgrade. The first thing to check is whether your config.inc.php settings are different.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

3

Alec
The config.inc.php looks to be using utf-8 in both sets, but I think some figures definitely got a bit scrambled in a minor way during the upgrade (which was 2.3.6 …2.48 and then the latest 3.1.1). So some of the bad characters are due to that process. I will continue to see what else it might be.
Thanks

4

Hi @sbiggles,

What specific settings are you using in config.inc.php for character sets in the [i18n] section?

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

5

Alec -just the defaults I think:
locale = en_US
client_charset = utf-8
connection_charset = Off
database_charset = Off
charset_normalization = Off
It is likely that special characters were not migrated in the database properly, but not entirely sure how best to enter them in even if I fix them up as the data entry varies a bit - from database text fields to TinyMCE boxes.
I appreciate the help.

6

Hi @sbiggles,

Are you sure those settings match your pre-upgrade installation? In an ideal world those settings should be…

client_charset = utf-8
connection_charset = utf8
database_charset = utf8

Note that the inconsistency is intentional!

However, if your content is in your database with a mixed/confused encoding, this may not work. The best resolution in that case is to transcode your database; a tool like iconv might help, but its use is a little outside the scope of this forum. There should be information on Stackoverflow.com or similar.

A note: It’s better to have a consistent incorrect encoding than to mix correctly-encoded text in with incorrect text. Once you have mixed encodings it’s hard to separate the two.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

1 Like
7

Alec
Thanks for the advice. I will run through it all and see how to sort it out based on that. I love the note! Have to wrap my head through that!!
Cheers
Simon

8

thanks… this solved my same issue